BBC Documentary: Earth Under Water

Published on Jan 15, 2013

A disaster waiting to happen in Earth Under Water ….
Imagine sea levels rising to over 70 metres… Eminent climatologists think another Great Flood is inevitable if current CO2 emissions continue. Based on research by NASA astro-biologist and paleontologist Professor Peter Ward and a group of respected American climatologists.

Earth Under Water is an eye-opening documentary uses scientific evidence past and present, archive footage, location photography and CGI to explore the terrifying consequences should the atmosphere’s CO2 levels treble over the next 100 to 300 years, as predicted.
Step by step, it paints a chilling picture of the world as the sea levels rise from between one and 70 metres, unravelling the science behind this cataclysm, revealing when it could strike and what its impact would be on humanity.
The film also questions experts and politicians about what measures can be taken now to stop the current rise of CO2 emissions, and explores how extreme engineering will buy us time. But the message of this film is stark, spelling out in graphic detail the Earth’s apocalyptic future that we have been avoiding.

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/The LBS website is the umbrella for two projects based at UCL tracing the impact of slave-ownership on the formation of modern Britain: the ESRC-funded Legacies of British Slave-ownership project, now complete, and the ESRC and AHRC-funded Structure and significance of British Caribbean slave-ownership 1763-1833, running from 2013-2015.
The Encyclopaedia contains the identity of all slave-owners in the British Caribbean at the time slavery ended in 1833.

Congratulations to Saints students Mariam Khan, Alisha Singh (Grade 11), and Akshay Bankay (Grade 8) who were Award Winners in the Secondary School Essay Competition sponsored by the Fire Advisory Board at the Ministry of Home Affairs, in observance of Fire Prevention Month October 2012. The topic established for participants to premise their essays upon was "Discuss your understanding of Fire Prevention Measures that can be taken in various environments such as homes and factories to adequately deal with these situations. Also how would you seek to educate the public on how fire and loss prevention plays a bigger role in your everyday life?"
St. Stanislaus College was announced to be the only school with winners from both the Junior and Senior categories. Congratulations also to teachers Ms. Glen and Ms. Baird who were responsible for working with students in the Senior and Junior categories respectively.

A Prize-Giving Ceremony was held on January 31st, 2013 at the GNS Sports Complex on Carifesta Avenue and was attended by very distinguished personalities, including the Hon. Minister of Home Affairs.

Richard Allsopp enjoyed one of the most significant
academic and intellectual careers in the Commonwealth Caribbean. He was the
leading lexicographer of the English spoken and written in the region and edited
the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage. Though ill for a number of years he
managed to finish a supplement which is due for publication soon.

He was born Stanley Reginald Richard Allsopp in 1923,
in Georgetown, British Guiana, the eldest of four boys. One brother died in
adolescence, the others had long and distinguished careers in public service. He
won a scholarship to the leading boys’ school, Queen’s College, in 1936.

This began a long relationship with the school, for
he taught there before and after he left to do a degree in England and he became
its acting headmaster. There too he met Forbes Burnham, later Prime Minister,
then President, of an independent Guyana. Burnham would best Allsopp in the
competition for the most prestigious scholarship in 1942.

The region in the 1930s was experiencing political
unrest: the Depression had, as with other agricultural economies, started in the
1920s and by the mid-1930s was leading to strikes. The demand for
self-government and a federation of the British West Indian territories grew.
The intellectual influences were also becoming more favourable to
nationalism.

In the first two decades of the 20th century two
works had been published locally on English and Creole in British Guiana. Norman
E. Cameron, who taught at Queen’s College and was still there when Allsopp
became a permanent member of staff, published his Evolution of the Negro (1929
and 1934) examining the African background to the history of British Guiana. A.
R. F. Webber published his history of British Guiana in 1931, and West Indians
were beginning to publish their writings not only in a growing number of local
magazines but also abroad.

Claude McKay from Jamaica, C. L. R. James and Alfred
Mendes from Trinidad would all have novels published abroad. From British
Guiana, Edgar Mittleholzer would publish his first novel Corentyne Thunder in
1941. Allsopp belonged to a generation shaped and inspired to greater confidence
by these events.

After briefly teaching at Queen’s College before
going to England to take a degree in French at the University of London he
returned to teach there and was also an extramural teacher for the newly founded
University College of the West Indies. At Queen’s he was known for his exacting
style of teaching. His great ability meant that in 1962, when the last British
principal left, he took over the school. Unfortunately, by then British Guiana
had descended into a period of violence and unrest, caused by local political
rivalries and abetted by outside influences. The ethnic tensions invaded even
the school, and the traumas of this period remained with Allsopp as with most
Guyanese who had experienced it.

He was relieved to take up an appointment with the
University of the West Indies as it had become and could not, a few years later,
be tempted by Burnham’s offer to head the University of Guyana, even though
several of his Queen’s colleagues had moved there.

Joining the newly established Barbados campus of the
University of the West Indies in 1963 as its first lecturer in English, Allsopp
was influential in its development, serving as vice-dean and chairing the
division of Survey Courses and Social Sciences. The most significant of its
survey courses was Use of English, which introduced students on both the other
campuses, in Jamaica and Trinidad, to the varieties of Standard English and
Creoles of the West Indies. He became the first public orator of the campus and
served on its council and senate. In 1971 he started his Caribbean Lexicography
Project. By the time he retired he was Reader but was then appointed to an
honorary chair and later honoured with a doctor of letters degree.

The seeds of this project lay in a translation from
French when he was an undergraduate. Allsopp’s “the rain held up” instead of “it
stopped raining” met with no approval from either the lecturer or his fellow
students. When he began to teach French on his return to his old school he
started to collect evidence of the differences between Standard English and
Standard Guianese English to help his pupils. This began his shift from French
to English. He published his first articles on the topic in the new local
literary journal Kyk-Over-Al, founded and edited by the poet A. J.Seymour. His
new interest in language led to further academic work in linguistics: in 1958 he
received a distinction for his London MA dissertation; in 1959 he attended the
first International Conference on Creole languages at the University of the West
Indies in Jamaica and received a PhD from the University of London in 1962. All
this had been accomplished while he taught full-time.

Ambitious plans to produce a West Indian version of
F. G. Cassidy and R. B. LePage’s Dictionary of Jamaican English (1967) which was
based on historical principles, soon disappeared as impracticable. The decision
was made to concentrate on contemporary usage. The project, however, was
directed not at the Creoles of the West Indies (basilects) but the most
prestigious forms of English (acrolect) and the variety intermediate between
that and Creole (mesolect).

What it did share in common with the Creole
specialists was a recognition that much in the way of grammar and syntax had
been inherited from Africa. It was intended to be useful in education at all
levels. The collection of data involved workshops in most of the territories and
was expensive. The Government of Guyana provided US$100,000 from 1975 when it
seemed that the project would founder. Even Allsopp despaired of its ever being
finished. Fortunately, with the support of colleagues and his third wife,
Jeannette, who contributed a supplement on the French and Spanish names of flora
and fauna, it was finally published in 1996.

A supplement, Allsopp’s last academic work, will soon
appear. In 2004 he published A Book of Afric Caribbean Proverbs. The
Lexicography Project continues under the direction of Jeannette and the French
and Spanish supplements continue to appear.

Having contributed much to Caribbean intellectual
life Allsopp was honoured by the Barbados Government and received the Guyana
Literary Prize and a doctorate of letters from the University of the West
Indies.

He is survived by his wife, Jeannette, and his four
children.

Richard Allsopp, lexicographer and teacher, was born
on January 23, 1923. He died on June 3, 2009, aged 86

She was born Ella Rees Williams to a Creole mother
and a Welsh-born doctor in Roseau, on the Windward Island of Dominica. As a
white girl in a predominantly black community, Rhys felt socially and
intellectually isolated; in 1907 she left the island for schooling in England,
returning only once, in 1936. Although Rhys's attitude to her birthplace
remained ambivalent throughout her life, the Caribbean shaped her sensibility.
She remained nostalgic for the emotional vitality of its black peoples, and the
conflict between its beauty and its violent history became enmeshed in the
tensions of her own often-fraught personality.

Rhys's Dominican background is important to her
works, playing a part in both her longer fictions like Voyage in the Dark, and
in short stories such as "The Day they Burned the Books." Dominica is the most
rugged of the Caribbean islands. Its peaks rise to more than 5000 feet despite
being only 29 miles long. The violent contrasts between dense vegetation, deep
gorges, waterfalls and stretches of arid wasteland are totally unlike the
atmosphere that Rhys was presented with upon her arrival in Britain. The
irreconcileability of the landscapes is evoked in Wide Sargasso Sea when
Rochester's attitude to the beauty is to mistrust its lushness -- "what an
extreme green!"

Rhys identified with the Negro community in her
childhood, and indeed throughout her life, although she came to realise that her
world could never align itself with that of her nursemaid, Meta, and other Negro
mentors. She envied the Negro community its vitality and often contrasts the
sterility of the white world with the richness and splendour of black life.
Themes of attempted friendship with black girls recur in her work, an obvious
example being the figures of Tia and Christophine in Wide Sargasso Sea, but Anna
Morgan in Voyage in the Dark also attempts to find a friend among the Negro
community.

Rhys's early life paralleled that of other
postcolonial writers who have felt themselves betrayed by the reality of
Britain; it was only when she was in her seventies that she found a social niche
in England. Shaped by her instinctive drives and created out of the struggle to
comprehend her own isolated predicament; her writing was obstinately
unconventional. In part, this prevented her work from receiving due recognition
for much of her lifetime.

Rhys's short fiction shows a remarkable variety of
themes. A significant number of stories recall her childhood in the Caribbean
and range from a girl's cruel sexual awakening ("Goodbye Marcus, Goodbye Rose")
to incisive sketches of the narrowness of small-island life ("The Day They
Burned the Books"). Others, such as "Vienne," reflect Rhys's restless bohemian
life in Europe. In "Let Them Call it Jazz," she assumes the personality of
Selina, a black West Indian in London, whose struggles parallel her won.
However, although Rhys declared "I have only ever written about myself," it is
important that her life and her writing not be confused. Her first published
novel was Postures (1928, American title Quartet: A Novel, 1929). While it lacks
the confidence of her later work, in the character of Marya Zelli it introduced
what was to become the recognisably Rhys heroine -- sensitive, sexually
attractive, and vulnerable, with a tendency to self-defeat. It also shows Rhys's
stylistic control in moving within characters and in observing them objectively,
without irony.

In After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930), the heroine is
Julia Martin, who is recovering from the experience of sexual betrayal and
attempting a futile liaison with the decent but inadequate Mr Horsfield. The
moral descent is completed in Good Morning Midnight (1939), a brilliant
evocation of psychic disorientation and despair. The heroine, Sasha Jensen,
remembers a life of love and defeat and faces the ultimate darkness suggested by
the novel's title. Told in first person narrative, alternating between the past
tense and the continuous present, Good Morning, Midnight is a technical tour de
force.

Voyage in the Dark (1934), Rhys's third published but
first-written novel, is her most autobiographical work of fiction. Its heroine,
Anna Morgan, aged nineteen, has come to England from Dominica. The novel opens
with a compelling evocation of the Caribbean, its colours, sights, smells, and
warmth. As the novel recounts Anna's attempt to come to terms with her new life
the inner narrative traces a remembered life in the Caribbean.

Rhys disappeared from public view until 1958, when
the BBC dramatised her Good Morning, Midnight. The publication of Wide Sargasso
Sea followed in 1966. Jean Rhys's great-grandfather, John Potter Lockhart,
acquired a plantation in Dominica in 1824. After his death in 1837 his widow was
left to run the estate. The riots in 1844 following Emancipation (see Slavery)
led to the destruction of the estate and the burning of the house. Rhys visited
the plantation and was affected by the experience. An awareness of this may help
to explain some of the more ambiguous attitudes in Wide Sargasso Sea, such as
Antoinette's caustic remarks to Christophine and Tia about their blackness.
Rhys's own background, as well as Antoinette's, was that of the former
slave-owning Creole community.

Rhys's final years brought fame and freedom from
financial anxiety, but no work of similar importance. She published a collection
of new short stories, Sleep it off Lady, and worked on her autobiography,
unfinished at death, published posthumously as Smile Please: An Unfinished
Autobiography (1979). Her letters were published in 1984 in England as Jean
Rhys's Letters: 1931-1966, edited by Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly.

Made perfect thus in little space,God called thee to his long embrace,Before the mists of earth could throw,a shadow on thy robe snow.Guide from thy throne.....

Fr. Clement Barraud.

Significant Dates in the History of St.Stanislaus College

* May 1st,1866- Catholic Grammar School started* November 3rd 1866- School moved to Main Street premises* 1868or 69- School moved to Waterloo Street* 1871- School returned to Cathedral Presbytery* 1871- Boarders introduced* 1878- School temporarily closed* 1880- School re-opened* 1897- School moved to site of St. Mary's School, Brickdam* 1907- School moved to present Brickdam site* 1907- Name changed from'Catholic Grammar School' to " Saint Stanislaus College"* 1928- Weld Wing opened* 1942- College Association formed* 1952- Scannell Wing opened* 1966- College celebrates 100th Anniversary* 1972- Hopkinson Wing opened* 1974- Workshop built* 1975- College Farm opened* 1975- Collge becomes co-educational* 1976- College becomes a Govenment School* 1980- College ceases to be run by the Jesuits* 1991- College celebrates 125th anniversary* October 2004 - Board of Govern0rs appointed